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Becoming Signs of Contradiction

J. D. Flynn

Last week, British judges upheld a law that permits children with Down syndrome or other disabilities to be aborted in the U.K. at any time before they are born,...

More Than Our Appetites

J. D. Flynn

Fr. James Martin, S.J., avers that his advocacy does not challenge Catholic doctrine on homosexuality. He has made a point of publishing an essay delineating Church teaching on the...

Restoring Trust

J. D. Flynn

On Monday, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops will convene for its 2018 Fall General Assembly—a meeting that may be one of the most important in the history...

Looking Down syndrome in the Face

J. D. Flynn

Before I met my son Max, I’d never spent much time with anyone who has Down syndrome. There was a disabled man in the small town where I grew...

Shunning the Disabled

J. D. Flynn

Last October, our family realized that we were not welcome in the French Republic. I had always assumed that if we were made unwelcome in France, it would be...

The Civil Marriage Business

J. D. Flynn

In his 2015 Erasmus Lecture, Archbishop Charles Chaput called on America’s bishops to reconsider the Church’s role in the civil solemnization of marriage: “Refusing to conduct civil marriages now,...

Christ in the Desert

J. D. Flynn

On Saturday, I watched good friends carry a miniature white casket up the aisle of our parish church, to be laid before the altar for a funeral Mass. Their...

No Authority Over Divine Law

J. D. Flynn

In his column this week, George Weigel writes that “it cannot be the case that a grave sin in Poland is a source of grace two kilometers across the...

Suffering and Silence

J. D. Flynn

I hope that Martin Scorcese’s Silence, premiering this week, will accurately capture the genius of Shusako Endo’s novel. The novel is a meditation on evangelization, the intimate dialogue of...

The Third Rail of Catholic Life

J. D. Flynn

In the past seven months, Amoris Laetitia has become a kind of third rail in the life of the Catholic Church. Amoris stands at a delicate junction—between unchanging hermeneutic...

There’s No Such Thing as an Ex-Catholic

J. D. Flynn

In the post-modern West, well before believers can proclaim revealed truth, they’re forced to combat the epistemological consequences of the dictatorship of relativism—to explain the possibility that truth claims...

Adoption, Abortion, and a Message of Hope

J. D. Flynn

On Saturday morning, my wife and I took our children to pray outside the Planned Parenthood clinic near our home in Nebraska. Nearly 700 other people joined us—praying on...

The One and Only Culture War

J. D. Flynn

Last month, David Brooks published a column titled “The Next Culture War.” In it, he offers public-relations advice for Christians in the post-Obergefell era—an era when fewer people identify...

Torture and Witness to Life

J. D. Flynn

I am a very proud alumnus of the Franciscan University of Steubenville. I earned a bachelor’s degree there, I earned a master’s degree there, I met my wife there,...

An Open Letter to Richard Dawkins

J. D. Flynn

Dear Dr. Dawkins, Earlier this week, on Twitter, you drew attention to a troubling fact unknown to most people. You pointed out that in the United States and Europe,...